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Veal a la Milanaise
Egg and breadcrumb some thick slices of veal; fry and garnish with boiled macaroni cut in small pieces, with ham, mushrooms, truffles, all cut in Julienne strips, pepper, salt, and a little tomato sauce. Mix all these well together, and serve very hot.
Stuffed Veal Liver, or Liver a la Panier d'Or The Panier d'Or is a hotel in Bruges, much frequented before the war by the English. Take the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, a bit of bread the same size, and crumble them together; rub in some chopped parsley and onion and moisten it with gravy or with milk; season highly with salt, cayenne, and a little vinegar or mustard. Take your liver, if possible in one rather large flat slice. Make deep cuts in it, parallel to each other, and lying closely together. Press your stuffing into these cuts. Put a bit of butter the size of a walnut into a pan, or fireproof dish. Take your liver and tie it round with a slice of fat bacon or fat pork. Lay it in the dish and let it cook for an hour in a moderate oven. When done, remove the slice of bacon, if there is any left, and serve the liver in its own juice.
Two dishes run together on one page: a Milanese-style breaded veal cutlet with a garnish of macaroni and julienned ham, and a baked stuffed calf's liver from a Bruges hotel. Both are written for a cook who already knows the outlines.
- "Thick slices of veal"The recipe calls for thick slices, but a Milanaise cutlet is usually pounded thinner, to about 1/4 inch, so the centre is hot before the crumb darkens; fried quickly, two to three minutes a side.
- Egg and breadcrumbThe recipe gives only egg then crumbs. A preliminary dusting of flour is common practice but is not indicated here. Press the crumbs on and let the cutlets rest ten minutes before frying so the coating holds.
- The garnish is the dishEverything after the frying is a hot dressing, not a sauce: cooked macaroni cut short, ham, mushrooms and truffles all in matchsticks, bound with only a little tomato sauce. Keep it loose and barely moistened, or the coating on the veal softens.
- TrufflesTruffles were more plentiful and cheaper before the war than they are now, and appear here as a restaurant flourish. Preserved truffle peelings, or simply more mushroom with a few drops of truffle oil off the heat, gives the intended effect.
- A moderate ovenFor the liver, read 350F. The dish is covered by nothing but the bacon jacket, so a hotter oven dries the cut surfaces.
- Timing the liverAn hour at 350F for a single flat slice will give firm, fully set liver in the old style. If your slice is much under an inch thick, check at 35-40 minutes; liver held long past doneness turns grainy and the stuffing dries out.
- The stuffingOne hard yolk with an equal volume of bread makes a very small quantity. For a liver large enough to serve four, scale to three or four yolks and a matching amount of crumb, moistened just enough to hold together and pack into the slits.
- Bacon or fat porkThe barding slice is there to baste. Use unsmoked fatback or unsliced streaky bacon if you can; modern thin-cut smoked bacon renders away early and, as the recipe half-anticipates, may not survive the hour.
- YieldAllow one cutlet per person; the macaroni is a garnish rather than a course, so only a small quantity each. The liver, in one large slice, serves three or four.
Both dishes come from Mrs. Brian Luck's The Belgian Cook-Book (1915), assembled in Britain from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees after the German invasion, with proceeds going to relief work. That origin explains the book's tone throughout: home cooks and displaced professional cooks writing down what they remembered, often in shorthand, sometimes naming the restaurant the dish belonged to. The note that the Panier d'Or in Bruges was "much frequented before the war by the English" is the whole book in one line: a hotel on the Markt recalled by people who could not go back to it, and a readership expected to recognise the name. "A la Milanaise" was already a settled term in French professional kitchens for a breaded cutlet served with macaroni and a julienne garnish, codified in that form by Escoffier's generation, so the Belgian version here is standard restaurant French rather than anything regional. Stuffed liver, by contrast, is thrifty domestic cooking dressed up with a hotel's name — the slits-and-forcemeat treatment is an old way of making one flat organ meat feed a table.